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Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
trilogy of life,
a series of three cinematic adaptations of medieval texts, includes
The Decameron
(1970),
The Canterbury Tales
(1971) and
Arabian Nights
(1973). Much more than simple retellings, the films demonstrate a modern auteur’s purposefully idealized and stylized vision of the period, and each uniquely comments on narrativity within the texts. In
The Decameron
and
The Canterbury Tales , Pasolini himself plays the artist Giotto and Geoffrey Chaucer, respectively, affording him positions of considerable narrative power in the films. As Giotto suggests at the end of
The Decameron , Pasolini’s films dream the original texts, offering his own poetic visualization, in a way that is meant to revive the reading of his sources through irreverent cinematic homage. This book explores Pasolini’s visualized narrative in the first two films of the trilogy, showing how film becomes an alternative form of storytelling that allows auteurs like Pasolini to adapt, in varying degrees of faith, classic sources while displaying new artistic visions. The book first studies the two films in detail and puts them in perspective within the trilogy. Next, it interprets both films from a wider perspective, recounting misinterpretations, expounding upon Pasolini’s ideological vision, and defending the oft-criticized adaptations. Finally, the conclusion discusses how the films represent innovation over strict adaptation, and considers the paradox of rendering, non-realistically, the essence of original works. Appendices offer charts with information on the narrative structures of the films and the correspondences between them. A bibliography and a Pasolini filmography are included.
